Peter Parker, middle child

I’ve been worried for The Amazing Spider-Man for several months now. Ever since I heard the marketing was being held up in order to recalibrate the approach in the face of underwhelming reaction to the first trailer and marketing push late last year, I’ve wondered if Spider-Man doesn’t suffer from middle child syndrome. With over-achieving, Type A The Dark Knight Rises standing in as the older sibling and fun, carousing The Avengers as the youngest, Spider-Man is in the unenviable position of trying to find space to grow between the gargantuan presences of the other two superheroes this summer.

The official summer projections have Dark Knight and Avengers both poised to earn around a billion dollars, with Spider-Man coming in on the second tier with around half that. That sounds…aggressive to me. I know I’m bad at predicting box office, but Spider-Man is having a hard time sustaining interest. People get into it when a new trailer is released, like the one that just came out (I imagine it will be attached to The Avengers), but a week from now focus will have shifted away. We’re only five years out from the final installment of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man franchise, after all, and that last one was TERRIBLE. There’s a bit of a lingering bad taste about Spider-Man thanks to that movie.

I think The Amazing Spider-Man will break a hundred million just because there are enough fanboys who will see it regardless and propel it, but I’m looking at it kind of like X-Men: First Class. That movie got good reviews and made over $140 million, but it definitely suffered for the audience’s last memory of X-Men being the awful Wolverine: Origins. I think Spider-Man will do business similar to First Class, which is certainly a lot of money but everything’s relative when you’re spending $200+ million to make it in the first place.

About this new trailer—I dig it. Spider-Man was never my favorite comic book character, and I am not a big fan of Raimi’s movies, so I’m willing and open to liking Andrew Garfield as Peter Parker. It’s not like I’m clinging to loyalty elsewhere. I’m his for the taking (as a fangirl, you pervs). So it’s not the look of the movie that bugs me - it looks great. Garfield appears to be nailing both Peter’s sense of humor and his physicality. What kills me is that tagline:“The untold story”. You stop the presses in order to fix your marketing campaign and you don’t fix that awful tagline? The untold story—we’ve just had three whole movies telling this story! Here’s a freebie, Sony: The hero you thought you knew.

This is a solid trailer. It’s a good-looking movie. I’m just not sure it’s going to be enough given the still-looming presence of Raimi’s trilogy, and the competition of its flashier brothers.